GRGR (15): Good & Evil (was Enzian...)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Peter Petto wrote:
> 
> On 12/11/1999, rj wrote:
> 
> >peter petto:
> >
> > > I don't really understand why. In the arena of dog psychology: if I beat a
> > > dog daily and after several years liberated him, I wouldn't expect him to
> > > be kind or friendly to you.
> >
> >The dog's retaliation against the dog beater may be just deserts. And,
> >indeed, this dog's rampage against humans would quite likely be
> >indiscriminate, and understandably so; the psychology of the dog has
> >been affected (conditioned). But, if this dog were to attack your
> >innocent child then would you be so quick to endorse the dog's
> >reactions?
> 
> Well, um, I wasn't meaning to *endorse* the dog's reactions. I'm just
> saying that they're not unexpected.
> 
> And what I meant to say more clearly is this: the dog's behavior after
> being liberated doesn't alter the immorality of the beatings.
> 
> (and rj went on to say):
> 
> >That there are many "strong moral messages" in *GR* I guess is the
> >point, these often in absolute conflict with one another, each one
> >dependent on local context and individual perspective for its particular
> >"truth". There isn't a vantage beyond the text which can accommodate
> >their complexity as a unity, because individual human perception is
> >limited and preconditioned (this is a major theme of the novel in fact),
> >and this applies to readers and authors as well as to fictional
> >characters and historical personages. I perceive this to be a type of
> >moral relativism operating within the text: neither nihilism on the
> >reader's part or an inference of Pynchonian moral ambivalence are
> >constituted in this statement.
> 
> I'm still digesting this. At the moment I don't see strong moral messages
> in GR that are in absolute conflict with each other. Maybe someone can name
> some examples to help me.

One way, it's the way I approach the novel anyway, to
approach GR is to think about the satire in the novel. Who
or what is the target of Pynchon's satire? I think it is the
Western world and the so called "postmodern condition"---the
western cultural institutions: philosophy, science, art,
history, politics, economics, psychology, sociology, mass
media. The satire is more specifically Menippean in that it
dwells on, complains about and laments this condition. So we
find the typical Menippean features, for example, the ugly,
the painful, the ridiculous; the attention to carnality,
scatology, and consumption; the caricatures' paranoid
obsessions, the seriocomic prose and verse; the popular
diction, proverbs, and culture; the multiple parodies; the
epideictic variety of the comic and the fantastic represent
an encyclopedic extension of the genre's possibilities.
Pynchon, and I know folks won't like this box, and I don't
like it either, but while it limits our appreciation of this
monumental work, it enhances our understanding of the text
by allowing for comparison to like and dissimilar texts, is
a satirist. This is not simply mho, but the opinion of
dozens of Pynchon scholars and the subject of hundreds of
dissertations, included in this group are Weisenburger,
Kharpertain, and Eliot Braha's Bakhtin/Frye dissertation. 

Satire is by its definition, not morally ambiguous,
relativistic, or indeterminate. 
But GR is a daunting mixture of ironic reciprocities, ironic
correspondenses, inversions, and unexpected doubleings,
sometimes, as McHale points out in his study, we are led
into drak alleys adn have to find our own way out, and when
we do, some three to four hundred pages later we realize
that we are back where we started because the path we found
out was false (I'm curious to here others talk about Polker,
I don't think I agree with the comments thus far). So we are
disoriented as we read the novel and there is a profound
historical pathology, indistinguishable from the  profound
psychopathology of many, if not all of the characters and
since we spend so much time in their burnt out, drugged,
crazy, dreaming, ect. minds and since our narrators are
unreliable, we are confronted with a worls that seems to not
to have a center that can hold or better yet, not to have
ever had a center that held. It is my opinion that Pynchon
is all too obvious about this center in the begining of the
book. That center is deep in the mystery of the earth. So
unlike all of his previous fiction, and Entropy is the
clearest and easiest plkace to make this comparison, GR is
not gnostic and is not existential. Pynchon continues to
develop this metaphysics (which nis embued with
morality---think 1960s American radicalisms--peace, love,
political activism etc). 







> 
> I'm a bit overwhelmed by the many major themes of GR, but that perception
> is limited by preconditioning rings true with me.
> 
>     p3++